Water Edge fadeout

by danlin on 07/19/2007 14:18, 4 messages, last message: 07/21/2007 01:55, 1337 views, last view: 04/11/2024 01:21

Uh my english writing skills ar not so good so i make some screenshots and a link i think this explain best i try to say her :)

Water in Sauerbraten locks like this:
http://gedankenschlag.de/screenshot_175600.jpg

and now the screenshots of a techdemo with edge fadeout

Without fadeout:
http://www.talden.com/Images/WaterSim/waterHardEdges.jpg

With fadeout:
http://www.talden.com/Images/WaterSim/waterSoftEdges.jpg

and a link to the tech demo
http://www.talden.com/Pages/project_pages/project_aquaterra.htm

is this technik portable to the sauerbraten shaders ?

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#1: just a thought...

by Rainforce on 07/19/2007 20:13

I didn't have much knowledge of Sauer, but I think it's dificult because the game is based on cubes. this River on the screen more looks like a plane or something like that, of which the shape is defined like a normal polygon, not like squares/cubes.

[Sorry, but for the next posts it's better you use sometimes a online dictionary... I need one, too. It's "interesting" how something easy in german becomes something realy difficult in english;) ]

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#2: It's a nice idea but...

by eihrul on 07/19/2007 21:11

Not terribly appropriate for Sauer.

They use heightmapped terrain, so they can just reuse the heightmap to do it.

But Sauer has no such heightmap to rely upon, so it would require a third rendering pass for the water:

1) reflection
2) refraction
3) depth

Can someone say... expensive?

Essentially what this is doing is a one plane volumetric fog, where you render the depth of the scene underneath the water into a texture, then take that depth and generate a transparency/alpha value based on it.

I mean, it could be an option for extra higher quality water, but it wouldn't be cheap.

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#3: Re: It's a nice idea but...

by danlin on 07/19/2007 23:43, refers to #2

thx for the fast replay !

I should insert a PayPal link her ;)
for low performace hardware owner.

but it looks sooooooo nice ;)

and which is with static generatet depth informations
(like the lightmap generator) but with a heightmap of the water

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#4: techniques...

by metlslime on 07/21/2007 01:55

I could imagine a process where the water surface is generated by some sort of CSG process, and then each flat mesh gets a polygon strip generated along its perimeter, where the polygon strip has alpha 0 on the outer ring of verts. It would have to be regenerated using a "recalc" after editing geometry near the water.

But that doesn't sound like the kind of thing Aardappel and the other coders would find appealing -- it's not low-hanging fruit and doesn't fit very well into the existing feature set of sauerbraten.

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